I'm not sure I've posted about it in the context of Salome yet, but I'm sure I've admitted this before: I have difficulty with suspension of disbelief in theatrical settings. I can respect, for example, all of the effort that goes into a well-choreographed stage fight or intimate moment, and I've found it interesting to participate in those sorts of scenes. To the extent that audiences believe them, I can even sort of grasp the appeal and impact of those sorts of scenes. But for me... they just don't do anything?

And I understand that that's a me thing. I really do. (I also find car chases in movies boring AF, and I have fallen asleep on many an action movie final fight between two very similar CGI things chaotically slugging it out.) But it definitely feels not great to be unable to appreciate such deliberately integral elements to so much media? And depending upon the emphasis people place on those elements and how much their appeal derives from their relatability -- particularly when it comes to intimate connections between characters -- it feels not good to be the sort of person who can't appreciate those things.

(I generally derive no satisfaction from labels or flying flags that feel like they belong to other people far more than they belong to me, especially given that the terms and the flags are permitted to belong to anyone and mean anything an individual wants them to mean. So here as well -- while I can acknowledge that a great many people derive comfort and belonging and all-around good feels from these things -- they do nothing for me at best and at worst highlight my own individual deficiencies and fundamental dissimilarity to others because I find them so viscerally unappealing to watch.)

There is probably the sort of director who, despite being unable to appreciate a thing themselves, might view said thing as so core to the play -- and moreover people's expectations when coming to see the play -- that that thing must be included. "If the audience has their expectations met and receives the play well," that director might say, "then I feel satisfied with my production even though this aspect of the play I directed remains necessarily alien to me."

But I am not that sort of director, and I have put a *lot* of thought into how I might stage various productions that seem to call for heavy fight and/or intimacy choreography largely absent those moments -- not necessarily cutting them from the plays altogether (though in some places that is indeed what I'd do), but staging them in various ways that imply the action without depicting it. And this is what I wanted to do with Salome. It was *important* to me to do this with Salome.

Granted, the approach we took to Salome did most of the work. The thing that appealed to me about Salome *in the first place* was seeing the characters of A Man of No Importance doing to the Dance of the Seven Veils what I was already doing to nearly every "intense" play I saw, and the idea for how we'd address it in our version instantly popped into my head in pretty much the form it maintained from inception to ultimate execution. (At several points I was pressed with the notion of ending the dance with simulated nudity: bubble wrap covering the private areas in a simulation of the pixelation that would cover private bits as digital images increased in popularity via the growing internet. I did not entirely feel comfortable/confident articulating fully why I was opposed to this -- instead I merely reiterated that I was married to the original concept, which was also true -- but somehow it would have crossed a line for my personal sensibilities. I do think it would be a clever way to end the dance in another Salome production.) Blackouts have been done over kisses before.

And yet somehow -- particularly given the criticisms of my tonal approach and the insistence that Salome should be an overtly sexual production of a sort that I might not at all enjoy watching live -- the audience's ability to connect with a Salome that lacked these more nakedly sexual moments felt like a particularly meaningful test to me. This was, if not asexual content (I'm not bothered by and often even enjoy the presence/existence of sexual attraction in stories; it's the explicit depictions that throw me), fairly asexual staging and presentation. And I admit to weeping a little every performance when watching my Salome deliver the setup lines so compellingly over the midi underscoring as the warm lighting faded to black over the kiss. It really did work SO WELL and we didn't have to show it happening.

I'd been made to feel like audiences would feel cheated that they didn't get to see the kiss. And eh, I suspect at least some folks did feel cheated. But I don't think most folks felt cheated? And even if they did feel cheated I think they forgot about feeling cheated when the lights came up on the horrified assembly and the disgust was so hilariously palpable and then the Mortal Kombat parody happened and then the final line just brought it all home. (Among many favorite moments from the recordings is one where an excited audience member can be heard whispering the catchphrase repeatedly as Jokanaan "revives" and then squealing delightedly as he delivers it himself.) It felt so weirdly, inexplicably, honestly kinda pathetically validating (part of the reason I cried so hard was embarrassment) to see things work -- really work -- absent the things that I can't feel but have been made to feel are necessary for anyone to feel at all engaged by anything happening in this particular story and so many other contexts besides. Perhaps especially when it comes to this sort of thing, I don't often get to feel that.